The following relates to the document layout art. It finds application in automatic and semi-automatic document layout systems, in methods of selecting a document layout for selected content, in proofing document layouts, in automatic and semi-automatic document proofing systems, in document publication systems, and in other like applications.
A common component of publishing tasks such as printing, website maintenance, email solicitation, and other types of publication is the development of a suitable layout for publishing the selected content. In publishing, selected content such as text, images, figures, tables, equations, logos, or so forth is to be arranged on a printed page, a webpage, the body of an email solicitation, or so forth. Content layout can be specified in various ways, including automatically or semi-automatically through the use of a layout template, by intervention of a graphic artist, by automatically, semi-automatically, or manually specifying low-level layout parameters such as font size, font type, image characteristic, or so forth. Depending upon the workflow configuration, the person generating the content may have limited control over the layout of the final published document.
There are typically a large number of possible layouts for a given content. The quality of each layout can be assessed in many different ways, suitably set forth as component layout quality criteria, such as color harmony, alignment, balance, uniformity, contrast, navigability, cost, amount of white space, or it might be more directly computed from lower-level properties, such as positions of bounding boxes of page zones, absolute color values, font sizes, or so forth. The number of component quality criteria can be large, for example as high as dozens or even hundreds of different component quality criteria. Moreover, various component criteria are interrelated, so that trade-offs are involved in selecting a layout. For example, using a larger font size may be desirable from a readability standpoint, but the larger font size may adversely affect the amount of white space, or may result in a longer layout (that is, more pages), or may adversely affect other component quality criteria.
In high-capacity publishing, the time that can be allotted for layout selection is limited, and the person selecting the layout may be different from the person who generated the content to be published. Accordingly, it is desirable to have a mechanism for assessing the quality of a candidate layout in an automated or semi-automated fashion, so as to facilitate layout selection from amongst a plurality of candidate layouts. However, the overall quality of a layout is a subjective measure that is usually determined by a human evaluator, and is not readily amenable to automated or semi-automated determination. Furthermore, there may be stylistic issues related to document genre or brand image that imply a need for different overall quality measures.